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Oregon Social Learning Center to Celebrate 40 years of “Science Benefiting Families”

What began as a collaboration between two psychologists at the University of Oregon in 1977 evolved during the past forty years to become an organization that today employs 150 people, including 16 scientists, and has helped tens of thousands of families in our community and around the world. Oregon Social Learning Center will celebrate its 40th Anniversary at the Campbell Community Center in Eugene on Friday, July 28, 2017. Members of the media are invited to join the 40th Anniversary Celebration, which begins with a gathering of scientists and community members at 2:00 p.m. and ends with a night of storytelling, slideshows, skits, and even a friendly game of cornhole or two beginning at 5:00 p.m.

“We’re celebrating forty years of making a difference in the lives of children, families, and communities. We’re also celebrating OSLC’s founder, the late Jerry Patterson and the hundreds of people who have spent their careers here,” Varnum says. “These researchers, and the people who support them, have contributed more than 1,100 published books and journal articles as well as a number of evidence-based interventions.”

These evidence-based interventions based on research conducted at OSLC include the internationally acclaimed KEEP is an evidence-based support and skill enhancement education program for foster and kinship parents of children aged 5 to 12 and teens (KEEP SAFE, and KEEP-P, for preschool-aged children); FAIR, an intensive treatment for parents referred to child welfare services for neglect and substance use; KITS, or Kids in Transition to School, a kindergarten readiness program; Parenting Inside Out® program, a nationally recognized cognitive-behavioral parenting skills training program grounded in OSLC’s Parent Management Training (PMT) program, is the only evidence-based parenting skills training program developed for parents involved in the criminal justice system; Treatment Foster Care Oregon (formerly Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care/MTFC; www.tfcoregon.com), an alternative to group, residential, and institutional placement for youngsters with severe antisocial behavior and mental health problems; and Parent Management Training, a family-based intervention that teaches effective parenting skills to parents of children with antisocial and behavior problems. Most often, research and interventions are developed in cooperation with schools, child welfare agencies, correctional institutions, local governments and other entities as well as other scientists from around the world. A complete list of OSLC projects is available here: http://www.oslc.org/projects/

Dr. Patricia Chamberlain, OSLC’s Science Director, joined OSLC as one of several scientists in the late 1970s after spending time as a special education teacher and developed Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care and Parent Management Training as a relatively new researcher. Chamberlain, who received the Society for Prevention Research’s Presidential Award (a lifetime achievement award) in 2017, says, “OSLC is an ideal workplace for research scientists who want the freedom and support to create innovative programs and conduct studies that have real world impact. We work together in a collaborative atmosphere. It’s the best.”

OSLC projects are funded entirely by grants from federal organizations such as the National Institutes of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), National Institute on Child Health and Child Development, National Institute of Justice, and others. In the past year, more than $8M has funded 25 research projects.

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Our Mission

We are a collaborative, multidisciplinary center dedicated to increasing the scientific understanding of social and psychological processes related to healthy development and family functioning. We apply that understanding to the design and evaluation of interventions that strengthen children, adolescents, families, and communities.